Exploring the Purpose of Things

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Sunday, January 07, 2018

According to a new paper, "big data evidence suggests that the English language area was not capitalist between 1800 and 2000" (via @kvistgaard).

The authors analyse the occurrence of "pertinent keywords" found in Google Books from the period in question. As far as I can see from the abstract, the keywords are selected on the assumption that capitalism can be associated "with any form of over-average importance or even dominance of the economy" .

The argument appears to be that an era is capitalist only if people are strongly conscious of the economy and of certain economic phenomena, and that this consciousness is reflected in the literature of the time.

This doesn't allow either for the possibility that people didn't talk about capitalism because they took it for granted, or for the possibility that they were suffering what Engels called "false consciousness". (Marx is often credited with this concept, but he never used the term himself.) Foucault showed how the Victorians thought differently about certain things (such as discipline and sexuality) but that doesn't mean those things didn't exist.

It is also worth noting that the literature that is preserved in Google Books may not fairly represent different social classes. As Ruth Livesey comments in relation to a different collection, "although there is much to be learned about middle-class life ... relative few that give central place to class".

What about the reverse argument? The religious authorities were obsessed with witchcraft between 1550 and 1700, particularly in Germany and Scotland, and King James VI of Scotland wrote a treatise on witchcraft. So if we analysed "pertinent keywords" (not to mention the "necessary hashtags"), we might be able to "prove" that witchcraft was more prevalent than capitalism in this period.

However, as @kvistgaard points out ...

Evidence-based policy leads to policy-based evidence. Then and now.

Twitter is not an appropriate place to seriously discuss concepts like "existence" and "truth".

Sunday, November 12, 2017

#amtsb @proto_type's current performance work, which I caught at the South Bank Centre in London this weekend, is called A Machine They're Secretly Building. The title comes from a warning by Edward Snowden, as reported by Glen Greenwald.

"I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy,
internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with
this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."

As I filed out of the performance, I bought a copy of the script, paying with cash rather than credit card (as if that's going to stop THEM knowing I was there). In her introduction, Alwyn Walsh mentions Henry Giroux and the idea of disimagination. Henry Giroux credits this idea to Georges Didi-Huberman who, starting from four photographs taken by Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau, had offered an extended and profound meditation on the
status of the image as a means of historical analysis. Giroux's version of the politics of disimagination refers to images (and also institutions, discourses, and other modes of representation)
"that undermine the capacity of individuals to bear witness to a
different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and
collective resistance".

According to Giroux, therefore, the disimagination machine "functions primarily to undermine the ability of individuals to
think critically, imagine the unimaginable, and engage in thoughtful and
critical dialogue: put simply, to become critically informed citizens
of the world". Thankfully, Walsh tells us, "this ... is what theatre and performance is so perfectly equipped to challenge".

So the Proto-type show aims to bear witness about what is going on. As the audience files into the performance space, we see two women dressed in black, with pink balaclavas. And a large screen facing the audience. One of the women is facing a camera: her face (or what we can see of it) is shown on the screen. As the show progresses, the screen (which has equal billing with the human characters in the script) also displays text and documentary fragments, apparently offering "facts" to illustrate or substantiate the shifting subjective voices of the human characters - sometimes resigned acceptance, sometimes angry protest - exploring the conflict between the security narrative (normal, law-abiding citizens versus terrorists, "keeping you safe") and the privacy narrative (state surveillance versus private individuals with rich inner lives). At the climax of the show, the screen shows the audience, with random members marked with green and red rectangles as if indicating targets of suspicion, perhaps based on behaviour or backstory. (From a technology point of view this looked pretty unsophisticated, but from a dramatic point of view it was sufficient to provoke audience discomfort.)

But if THEY are secretly building a machine, who exactly is THEY?

For Edward Snowden and Proto-type, THEY means governments - mostly the British and American governments, although Pussy Riot is referenced both in the script and in the pink balaclavas. But of course the power behind the machine could also be Google or Facebook, which might possibly (but how would I know?) be much more powerful than those of mere governments.

And if the machine was so secret, how could such a machine affect "the ability of individuals to
think critically, imagine the unimaginable, and engage in thoughtful and
critical dialogue"? Surely a much more dangerous machine would be one that seduced people into suspending their critical imagination, a machine that presented us with apparently objective facts, a machine that persuaded us to think with the majority - or at least what it told us was the majority view. (Surely that couldn't happen here?)

In his essay on the relationship between coercion and consent, Walter Streek refers to

"a huge machinery of coercion, easily the largest and most expensive in history, maintained in readiness for the state of emergency that may one day have to be called"

and chimes with Proto-type in suggesting that cover for the growth of this machinery is provided by the "war on terror",

"waged to enable the masses to continue living their pressured lives of competitive production and consumption".

In his 2011 documentary, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (#AWOBMOLG), Adam Curtis presented a powerful dialectic about technological capitalism. Although there were some logical flaws in his argument, as I pointed out at the time, I think Curtis was correct in identifying some of the key trends, as well as pointing at the multiple centres of power - for example, Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington. The multiple centres of power (media, technology, corporate, state) were also explored (with rather more academic rigour) at the Power Switch conference in Cambridge in March 2017.

A Machine They're Secretly Building is darker than Curtis (if that were possible) and more narrowly focused. But although one may be justifiably alarmed by state surveillance, the disimagination effect is arguably wreaked more by corporate surveillance, hashtag #YouAreTheProduct. So I'm looking forward to their next show, which I understand will be on economics.

Sunday, October 01, 2017

@NateSilver538 argues that the simple explanation for the US president's outbursts (that he has poor impulse
control and/or is bigoted) is (sometimes, usually) right.

The alternative explanation generally references some positive outcome for Trump. Silver mentions a few popular theories.

shoring up his base

questioning bias and fairness

driving a wedge between the Trumpian and the Republican establishment

distracting the media from other, more serious issues

Silver's argument is based on the fact that some of his outbursts don't appear to produce the desired result. But there are some further considerations to bear in mind.

Firstly, when Trump appears to do something stupid or selfish, this
prompts a barrage of criticism from various quarters. Some voices are
consistently anti-Trump, while others (including conservative media
channels, members of the Republican establishment and his own
administration) will firmly distance themselves from his more outrageous
pronouncements. This helps to reassure Trump's base that he remains an
anti-establishment champion and is not getting swamped by Washington.

Thus the desired effects may follow from the response to Trump rather than directly from Trump's own words and deeds. This suggests a delay before the effect is visible in Silver's data. This leads to my second point: there are always some effects cannot be reliably detected in real-time, and there may be some effects will never be detectable to Silver. That doesn't mean that the effects aren't real. Just because Silver can't detect a strategy doesn't mean there isn't a strategy. Maybe Trump isn't one step ahead of the media, maybe he's three steps ahead.

Thirdly, what matters is not the effect of a single outburst, or even a series of outbursts on a single topic, but the cumulative effect. Some say that being inconsistent, volatile, unpredictable is part of his shtick.

Trump’s two most recent tweets:1) Everybody’s against me, I’m a victim2) Everybody loves me, I’m doing a great job.

So what is the explanation for this inconsistency? Psychologists regard arbitrary and unpredictable inconsistency as a sign of emotional abuse, while mathematician Cathy O'Neil observes the similarity between Trump's behaviour and a machine learning algorithm.

Even if Silver is right about the intent and motivation of Trump's behaviour, that doesn't fully explain it. Just dismissing Trump as stupid or bigoted is not a sufficient explanation, because there are many stupid and bigoted people who do not behave quite like Trump. What is special in Trump's case is that there are some feedback loops that strongly reinforce these particular behaviour patterns, because they have produced the desired outcomes in the recent past.

Trump's worldview (Weltanschauung) causes him to pick up certain signals and ignore others. In terms of second-order cybernetics, we can view Trump as an autopoietic system (Maturana, Varela), within which the outcome-based theory and the impulse-base theory are not mutually incompatible after all, but are connected via closed feedback loops.

Saturday, July 01, 2017

The term virtue signalling originally referred to ways of making one's qualities visible - physical strength, economic wealth, moral character - in a way that would be hard to fake.

In 2015, James Bartholomew introduced an inverted and sarcastic usage of the term, referring to the common practice of paying lip service to a (supposedly virtuous) moral or political position, or expressing 'faux outrage' at something or other, and this usage was quickly picked up by other journalists. Of course this phenomenon has existed for centuries, but social media provides new channels for expressing and amplifying superficially held opinions.

Given this usage of the term virtue signalling, it was probably inevitable that people would also start talking about vice signalling, to refer to people saying outrageous things purely for effect.

For example, @PaulGoodmanCH accuses Arron Banks of vice signalling when he mounts an unfounded attack on Brendan Cox, the widower of the murdered MP Jo Cox. According to Goodman, Banks doesn't even believe what he is saying, he is merely saying it to gain more followers.

Again, there is nothing new about being deliberately outrageous in order to court controversy. In recent years, the tactic has been used with great effect by far right and alt-right politicians and entertainers, who strut around going "look at me, being dreadfully politically incorrect, aren't I awful?".

And there is a natural complementarity between the popular notion of virtue signalling and this notion of vice signalling - thus @sam_kriss defends viciousness and polemic in a good cause.

The vice signallers draw much of their energy from the knee-jerk disapproval of the virtue signallers. The political power of vice signalling is demonstrated by the extraordinary amount of broadcast airtime that is given to people like Nigel
Farage, and (of course) the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United
States.

But vice signalling is essentially an opposition tactic. So what happens when the vice signallers gain power? @BDSixsmith imagines a dialectic process of vice being translated into virtue.

"That which seemed transgressive must appear
conscientious. This is challenging for revolutionary movements if their
identities were based on being oppositional, and helps to explain the
internecine conflicts that tear them apart. If one’s ambitions transcend
nihilistic mischief-making one must have beliefs because one thinks
them principled, not merely as other people think them perverted."

Perhaps thinking along similar lines, many people expected Mr Trump's style to change when he reached the White House. But @PeterBeinart argues that the president’s personal attacks are not a distraction from his policy goals, they are his policy goals.

The problem is that virtue signalling, in the sense popularized by Bartholomew, is also an opposition tactic. In his excellent piece on making Twitter safe for politics, @mrianleslie warns us to beware what he calls the "moral surge", the pleasure of asserting one's moral integrity in public. Virtue signallers can safely deplore the grubby compromises of practical politics, confident they will never be called upon to make any decisions with real consequences. They were the ones who refused to vote for Clinton because she wasn't virtuous enough. And look what they got instead.

Saturday, March 25, 2017

@kate_hammer and @Europeripheral are planning a reading group, to be conducted over the internet. The reading group will explore the controversial 1972 book The Limits to Growth.

In 1972, a think tank called the Club of Rome published the alarming results of a computer simulation of the world economy, environment and population, developed by a team at MIT. If events followed what the authors called the "business as usual" scenario, without corrective or preventative action, the model projected “overshoot and collapse” by 2070. Since its publication, the report has been subjected to sustained critical attack. But a few years ago, researchers at the University of Melbourne compared the model with data from the past four decades. Their results show that the world is tracking pretty closely to the "business-as-usual" scenario.

Those interested in joining the reading group should complete this Google form.

Saturday, December 31, 2016

As @PennyRed said last month, after the election of Donald Trump:
"It turns out that you cannot stop fascism by turning off Facebook and
doing some deep breathing."

The other day, I was arguing with a woman who told me about some recent atrocities in a politically torn part of the world. She was clearly upset by these atrocities, which she framed in a particular way, and used to support some fairly extreme political conclusions. I disagreed strongly with her conclusions, and I was not minded to take the reports of the atrocities at face value.

When I looked on the internet later, I found a Facebook page that carried the same reports, in similar language. Presumably that was the woman's source. I also found a Wikipedia page on the conflict, which framed things in more neutral terms, based on a number of apparently independent sources. Although there were some unpleasant incidents reported by the mainstream news media, these were neither as drastic nor as one-sided as the Facebook material suggested. So while I don't have sufficient evidence to disprove the atrocities completely, I cannot see enough evidence to take them as seriously as she does.

Many Facebook pages use dramatic images to increase circulation. There have been images of billboards supposedly encouraging criminal behaviour. Snopes shows that a fake billboard, supposedly displayed in Finland to encourage rape by migrants, was actually based on a genuine billboard displayed in Liberia to offer support to rape victims. Georgina Guedes finds another version of the same billboard in South Africa, this time supposedly promoting violence against white farmers.

And both sides are now using the fake billboard tactic. Today someone tweeted a picture of a billboard advertising some Trump property development, which was supposedly displayed in an Indian slum, with people sleeping on the street below. A few hours later, the same person deleted the tweet and apologized for the fake.

Many people find it harder to apply the same critical eye to material that they are instinctively sympathetic to. But as I said in my earlier piece on The Purpose of Truth (November 2016), the more I want to believe something (because it fits my preconceptions), the more I should doubt it.

I don't know whether this is genuine. If these tweets even exist, do they represent the views of a real Trump supporter. And even if this is genuine, does it matter that one Trump supporter looks dangerously inconsistent? What conclusions, if any, am I justified in drawing from this? Should I be comforted because my low opinion of Trump supporters in general is corroborated? What should I now feel?

I know how I might go about resolving some of these doubts. But can I be bothered? I could spend all day fact-checking, but I have a proper job.

The point is that the 2016 US election was dominated by this kind of material, on both sides. Of course we are all sometimes tempted to take some of this material seriously, and to scorn the material from the other side. But if you want to propagate some controversial material, you have a moral duty to hesitate - am I being seduced into fanning some false flames?

This morning, for example, I wanted to tweet something about President-Elect Trump's phone call with South Korea. But I wasn't prepared to trust the first story I saw, so I didn't tweet anything until I found a Reuters story that confirmed it. Of course, it may still be untrue, but I'm glad I checked.

Thursday, September 01, 2016

Theresa May used to be rather keen on back doors. As Home Secretary until her move to Downing Street, she was responsible for the Investigatory Powers Bill, which insisted on back doors to enable the security forces to snoop on private communications. Now she insists that Britain will not remain in Europe by the back door. So what's wrong with back doors all of a sudden?

Now you might think I'm just making a snarky political point. Obviously the back door metaphor has a different meaning in the two contexts. But there is an important connection here, so please bear with me.

The European Data Protection Supervisor is dead against encryption back doors. By mandating encryption back doors, the UK therefore appears to place itself outside the European circle of trust. The proposed legislation would mean that any UK company or UK-based facility might be subject to an equipment interference warrant (aka back door), and would not be permitted to reveal whether it did or not. Aside from the competitive disadvantage that might follow from this potential vulnerability, UK companies and UK-based services would be challenged to demonstrate compliance with the European Data Protection Regulation, and might therefore be prevented from holding data on any European citizen. There is going to be a single market for data, and we wouldn't have access to it. Another blow for the UK service industry.

So evidently Mrs May is right. Backdoor membership of the EU is not on the table.

Sunday, June 26, 2016

HT @NickCohen4 @DavidAllenGreen @joncstone @bencoates1 I don't know whether Brexit was foreseen in Nostradamus or the Book of Revelations, but we can find troubling harbingers in the works of two writers honoured by the Swedish Academy.

Nick Cohen applies what Kipling said of the demagogues of his age to Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.

I could not dig; I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

If Boris Johnson looked downbeat yesterday, that is because he realises that he has lost.
Perhaps
many Brexiters do not realise it yet, but they have actually lost, and
it is all down to one man: David Cameron. ... Boris Johnson knew this
yesterday, when he emerged subdued from his home
and was even more subdued at the press conference. He has been
out-maneouvered and check-mated.

Jack of Kent invokes Godot

Stalemates can last a long time. And unless there is political will to resolve it, this stalemate will not resolve itself.